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Google, Facebook and Twitter To Block "Hash Lists" of Child Abuse
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook, Google, and Twitter are teaming up with the UK's Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to share hash lists of blocked indecent images. The move is intended to ensure that a picture pulled from one site can't show up again elsewhere. The BBC reports: "Online security specialists welcomed the move as a positive step, but said it would not block content on the 'darknet' — a network with restricted access — where abusers often posted images."
While it is an interesting concept, it is doomed to fail as a simple single pixel edit or hidden attribute edit will change the file's hash.
Its not a hash in the sense of MD5/SHA etc that hashes the file contents at the byte level. Its a perceptual image hash, a well studied technique.
A image will have the same hash even if a few pixels change or e.g its rotated/mirrored etc.. and resized of course
Image recognition is straightforward enough today to quickly find almost identical matches and generate the new hash. TinEye is really good for this kind of thing, and I'm sure Google's image match also works sufficiently well to keep an updated list of all the one-offs. Pretty easy to update it just like AdBlock or an SSL cert blacklist.
Hate crime (also known as bias-motivated crime) is a usually violent (lock em up, kidnapping, sex offender lists, etc), prejudice motivated crime that occurs when a perpetrator (social justice warriors) targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group (paedophilia).
This fight against paedophiles is really just unjustified homophobia in disguise, a form of racism, etc. The Internet Watch Foundation is not attacking child abuse, they are attacking paedophiles. The very article describes this as a " fight against paedophiles". There is no reason to think the vast majority of paedophiles are harming kids. This is why they're attacking child pornography. It's an easy target that won't go away and they can't possibly eliminate.
It shares so many similarities with the war on drugs. If there is one group of people you can attack and generally get agreement on this is it. It's too small, unorganizable, spread out, etc, and nobody would dare defend it out of fear for there lives. This gives the social justice warriors ample room to do what they want. They are really nothing but a misguided group of racists spreading hatred and fear. You wouldn't attack homosexuals because some are sexually abusing little children. It's no different with paedophiles. The entire war on paedophilia is identical to the war on drugs. It's utterly illogical. The idea that porn leads to sexual abuse was disproved long ago. It's just like violent video games leading to violence in the real world. The reality is studies have shown the exact opposite to be true.
This is doing nothing other than implementing a system of censorship and giving people the perception something is being done to stop child abuse. It's not. The article even says they're not able to stop the spread. It's not even illegal to be a paedophile, and yet they have no aversion to expressing there hatred for this group. They accuse an entire group of wrongdoing when there is zero evidence of that. There isn't any means to even produce such evidence because all the studies that back up paedophiles being bad were done on an imprisoned population which wouldn't represent paedophiles as a whole. It only represents violent paedophiles. It's no different than doing a study on homosexuals after locking up homosexuals. There is going to be a disproportionate number of violent homosexuals in custody.
They're not attacking people who abuse children. They're attacking a group of people who are hated for no logical reason. It's no different than attacking homosexuals for what a minority have done.
Go watch the 1950's Anti-Homosexual PSA - Boys Beware to see exactly what I'm talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17u01_sWjRE
They imply all homosexual are evil-doers that want to harm little children. It's utter nonsense.
Possession of child pornography is illegal in itself. Given that how would they have the original image to match against?
Almost every child pornography possession statute that I've seen has an exception for law enforcement activities. For example, a jury examining photos in a jury room wouldn't be guilty of possession if those photos are evidence presented at trial.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?